New York City, N.Y., Nov 4, 2009 / 05:37 am (CNA).-
Responding to a pundit’s charge that
Catholic nuns are “second class citizens” facing “inquisitions”
for their “modernity” and “independence,” columnist Kathryn
Jean Lopez has said there are many happy, young women in the convent
today and that the Vatican investigations especially concern dying
orders which have gone “off course.”

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
recently claimed that the Vatican apostolic visitation to American
women religious institutes hopes to “herd them back into their
old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or
independence.”

Dowd also criticized what she saw as
bishops’ hypocrisy in rebuking dissenting religious sisters but
apparently doing nothing in response to wayward and abusive priests.

Commenting on Dowd’s essay, Katherine
Jean Lopez wrote in National Review Online that Dowd needs to meet
some of the young sisters she has.

“Young women are willingly devoting
their lives to the Church, with veils and all,” she commented.

“It’s becoming common that orthodox
orders report waiting lists, as they see themselves filled to
capacity with young postulants and their overjoyed older sisters.”

The Vatican investigation is necessary,
Lopez wrote, because many orders are “literally dying.”

“They are not recruiting, and they’ve
long lost their charisms.”

As evidence, she noted reports of a
Dominican sister in Illinois who volunteers as an escort at an
abortion clinic.

Many religious orders no longer live or
pray in community and even openly dissent on Catholic teaching, she
reported.

“The Vatican has taken action because
there are ships off course. And the waters are rough; our culture
can’t afford to have so many lost at sea,” Lopez wrote. “The
fog has come because of surrender to the cultural chaos. Maureen
Dowd’s answers involve more of the same — confusing faith with
politically correct fluff.”

According to Lopez, Dowd wants the
Church to remake herself in the image of conventional mores. However,
this itself is the cause of the collapse of dying religious orders.

Pope Benedict XVI’s message is
different from that of the New York Times, Lopez continued, but it is
a liberating one, “much more liberating than the tired and angry
gender politics that offers little hope to the anxious men and women
of our time.”

On Tuesday Cardinal Franc Rode of the
Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of
Apostolic Life announced that a report on the findings of the present
apostolic visitation will be made public. He said he is “encouraged
by the efforts to identify the signs of hope, as well as concerns,
within religious congregations in the United States.”